Tough Love for Comics

Technical difficulties and summer vacation put this recording through the wringer, leading to compromised sound quality and a lack of timeliness. BE FOREWARNED!

Since we recorded this podcast, Justice League: Cry for Justice has been dogpiled by an all-star cast of bloggers. It was relatively fresh news when we recorded, but it’s still a pretty bad comic!

Additionally, we look at two books about Greek emigres, David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp and Peter Milligan & Davide Gianfelice’s Greek Street #1. One of them is an easy lock for Book of the Year, while the other is the latest in a line of disappointing first issues from Vertigo. Which is which? Listen and find out!

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After listening to the podcast I went digging around for the announcement & lead-up to Robinson’s “Cry for Justice”. According to Newsarama’s coverage from Wizard World LA, Congorilla is in fact the original Congo Bill and not a legacy character. His human body has been destroyed and he has been trapped in his gorilla form for the last 90 years. So there is a possibility that Robinson could be reaching for the kind of character redemption that was discussed on the podcast.

And I hate to break it to Joe, but there really isn’t a subversive undercurrent to the book at all. According to this interview on CBR Robinson likes a more informal Justice League:

Robinson said one of his favorite things about “Justice League,” so far, is that the heroes throw away the honorifics and keep the title worship to a minimum. “It occurred to me with Freddy Freeman. That’s’ a name that you brought up. Well, Hal and Ollie call themselves Hal and Ollie. You are never going to hear ‘Congorilla’ used in the book. He’s just Bill. Mikaal is Mikaal. Kara is Kara. Ray Palmer is Ray. So it’s a book where everybody is known by their first names, which I like.

Meltzer isn’t mentioned specifically, but from what you can read in the interview, and what we can’t “unsee” from the first issue, it is pretty obvious that Robinson likes some of the trappings of Meltzer’s League for better or for worse. Which I find pretty strange considering that the driving concept of the book (a more “proactive” league) seems to be a pretty explicit reaction to the inertia of Meltzer’s run.

[...] (at least for some of us), and as we’ve previously panned the first issues of Greek Street (Episode 107) and Unwritten (Episode 99), we decided to give each series a second chance to impress. So reviewed [...]